1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a service of displaying contents, and more particularly, to a system and method for efficiently providing contents by providing a plurality of display apparatuses and a single server which are connected through a network and perform predetermined message communication, and allowing the server to remotely control and monitor the display apparatuses.
2. Description of the Related Art
FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a conventional system 100 for providing a service of displaying contents.
The conventional system 100 includes display apparatuses 110, 130, and 150 and servers 120, 140, and 160, which are connected to the display apparatuses 110, 130, and 150, respectively, to provide contents. Content includes multimedia data such as music, images, and motion pictures and data having diverse text formats.
Various kinds of software programs are installed in, or independent hardware is provided to, each of the servers 120, 140, and 160 to convert content stored therein into a format suitable for the corresponding display apparatus 110, 130, or 150 to output. Accordingly, the output format of content selected by a server manager is converted using the software program or the hardware, and the converted content is output by a display apparatus.
Meanwhile, a display apparatus may include a function that allows a user to select content, receives the selected content from a server, and outputs the content. In this case, the display apparatus serves as a client.
FIG. 2 illustrates a method of providing a service such as content display between such client and server.
In operation S210, a client connects with a server using address and port information of the server while the server is operating. In operation S220, the client requests a service from the server. In operation S230, the server retrieves the requested service and provides the service to the client.
According to a conventional system like that shown in FIG. 1, a separate server having a function of converting the format of content is needed for each display apparatus and a server manager needs to personally select content to be output through the display apparatus. In addition, when a client-server structure shown in FIG. 2 is used, the server has difficulty in controlling a display apparatus corresponding to the client and monitoring the changes in the physical state of the display apparatus. The server may control the display apparatus using Universal Plug-and-Play (UPnP), which is one of the home network standards. In the UPnP, a remote control and monitoring service is implemented based on HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Accordingly, an HTML browser and parser are needed to analyze a message set and hardware or software having HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) level performance is needed to perform a UPnP protocol. However, when the remote control and monitoring service is provided using the UPnP, a message set for a remote control command to be provided is valid only when it is defined in the UPnP. As a result, there are a lot of restrictions in extension of the remote control command and a method of monitoring the changes in state of a display apparatus using a server. Moreover, even when just a simple remote control command is performed, an HTTP server for performing the UPnP protocol and a software program such as an HTML parser are needed.
Therefore, to overcome these conventional problems, an apparatus and method for displaying contents, by which a server efficiently provides contents to display apparatuses and remotely control and monitor the display apparatuses efficiently, are desired.